Big 12 football analysis

Help me out here…

I’ve suspected for some time now that a massive percentage of touchdown passes (or explosive gains) thrown in the Big 12 (or nationally) in 2016 came off the dig-post(go) route combination.

Teams like to set it up in different ways but that combo is ideal for attacking deep and it seemed that many teams were regularly landing big shots with it.

I’m also starting to suspect that a significant percentage of the interceptions thrown in 2016 were thrown to a weak side curl/flat defender that the QB lost track of. That’s typically either the weak side LB, like in this cover 3 set up:

Or often the free safety dropped down as a robber in quarters:

It could be a few different players but my suspicion is that this guy, who’s in charge of curl/flat or #2 to the boundary, is often free to roam a bit and often lurks into the passing window and picks off the QB.

But to what extent?

What would be awesome is if we could divvy up the Big 12 teams among us and determine for each team in the league what percentage of their touchdown passes came on dig-post or dig-go and what percentage of their INTs were thrown to that weak side defender.

Would any of y’all be willing to help me to find the answers to these queries?

It’s actually a fairly quick process if you use box scores and play by play to cue up the key plays in every game.

Thus far I’ve learned some interesting things but the rates of INTs thrown to that defender are really low and the percentage of TDs thrown to those double vert combos is not terribly high either although much higher in occurrence than those picks.

I already finished Hill’s tape, it was certainly interesting. He didn’t really have a problem with weak side defenders sneaking into the passing window, only threw one pick sorta like that and it was to a middle LB.

His problem seemed more throwing to guys that had defenders draped over them. I’m starting to see why Patterson was loath to blame it all on him.